Thèmes populaires

Drama film: Hiroshima mon amour

Résumé de la fiche

Ode to love and requiem for war, the incantatory threnody of Hiroshima mon amour lulls the senses and the spirit of the spectator grabbed by the literary and cinematographic poesy fruit of the collaboration between the writer Marguerite Duras and the cineaste Alain Resnais. Rewarded for its release by the Prix International de la Critique during the Festival de Cannes as well as the Prix Méliès, the masterpiece has not always been judged for its true worth since the commentators have often restricted their interpretation to the intrigue of love. We will proceed to a filmic analysis in which we will point out the veritable themes of the movie (1.) before effectuating a cinematographic analysis in which we will expose the different techniques used to accentuate the play of contrasts that shows beneath the entire work (2.). Eventually, we will work on a theoretical analysis in which we will collate the various texts discussed during the course to complement the books and articles that deal with the same dialectic between memory and oblivion (3.).

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Sommaire de la fiche

Filmic analysis.

The juxtaposition of thematic superficially antithetic.

The coordination of dynamics profoundly reflexive.

Cinematographic analysis.

A modernist visual construction.

An avant-guardist auditory composition.

Extraits de la fiche

[...] The man slaps her face in order to interrupt the instant of coexistence of two incommensurable universes and times where Nevers vampirizes Hiroshima. All the special effects work towards an extraordinary aesthetical finition typical of the Nouvelle Vague genre, which does not exclude a philosophical dimension in the movie Theoretical analysis The projet of Hiroshima mon amour comes from the request that has been adressed in 1957 to Alain Resnais of effectuating a documentary about the dropping of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. [...]

[...] On the surface, the plot is straightforwardly centred on a highly referential doomed affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect set against the backdrop of the eponymous city. Their chance encounter takes place in a café on her penultimate night in Hiroshima. Although they are both enjoy a happy conjugal situation, their relationship goes beyond a simple physical attraction in the sense that they establish an overwhelming passionate complicity that occurs merely infrequently when two individuals have the opportunity to mesh into a unified whole. [...]

[...] Whereas her attitude reveals the fragility of a sensitive woman, his disposition displays the solidity of an impassive man. The compelling performances of Emmanuelle Riva as well as Eiji Okada underline the symbolic contrasts between the two figures. The impossibility of their liaison arouses a sentiment of urgency that provokes the resurgences of secret scars hitherto buried in the depths of their beings. Owing to its ambiguous status of memorial (lieu de mémoire) according to Pierre Nora's terminology[1], Hiroshima provides a context with an extreme emotional charge that incites the lovers to share their remembrances about the dramatic historical event. [...]

[...] The force of forgetting and the power of remembering are two concepts inherent the one to the other: forgetting supposes that memory is preliminarily expressed by an effort of symbolization and representation; memory contains a part of forgetting since it is by definition only fragmentary. The originality of the film resides in the fact that it legitimates the notion of oblivion that the historians endeavour to erase in the name of science. This thesis has been ulteriorly supported by Paul Ricoeur who collates the duty of memory with the need of forgetting in his recent work La mémoire, l'histoire et l'oubli published in 2000. [...]